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I have no idea what the scale is, but I could actually understand a ban on gold dredging. I suppose you could control it by issuing a very few permits, but that would get ugly. At the same time, a bunch of folks digging up stream beds and dumping it back in would necessarily fuck up the water quality. Sure, it would recover but would you want your kids to play in a clear stream or a murky one?

Maybe you should look at how gold dredging works first before commenting on it. First of all, small time prospectors, by dredging, actually clean up the rivers. It takes out all the old mercury, lead shot and whatever other harmful metals that were placed in the stream, usually prior to the 1920's. Secondly, small time dredgers are only doing to the stream what the stream does to itself which is move the overburden constantly. This takes old rocks from the bottom and moves them to the top. This allows for more gravel beds in the stream which is actually where salmon lay there eggs. Lastly, these dredges do not produce big plumes of sediment. They are designed to bring the rocks from the bottom of the stream and place them back to bottom. The sediment does not come from the stream bottom anyways. Sediment comes the sides of the stream where NO dredging is allowed anyways.

Maybe you should look at how gold dredging works first before commenting on it. ...................

You assume novatwit cares about accuracy rather than attempting to make points whether she knows what of she speaks or not.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

Maybe you should look at how gold dredging works first before commenting on it.

Maybe you should learn to read a conditional statement before commenting on it. Everything I wrote was conditioned on there being a legitimate complaint about gold dredging or the scale of gold dredging. If there is no legitimate complaint, then there is no legitimate objection. However, I wouldn't blindly defend the practice simply because of some romantic notion of rugged men wrenching a living from the earth.

I am much more concerned about enviro-assholes trying to ban outboard engines everywhere, albeit I have to say that when you are swimming in the Gulf of Mexico at St Pete Beach and people with poorly maintained engines go too close to the swim zone and gas you with engine fumes you could consider being signed up in protest to that as well.

Of course, most of this is yet another consideration for the "We're not over populated." crowd. The more people you have using limited space for recreation, the more conflict you are going to have and the more laws you are going to have.

PS- If I had paid lots of money to live on some river in California, I wouldn't want to listen to a small engine all day long because some guy decided that piece of the river would belonged to him. I also have no compunction about cutting the lines to crab traps that get in the way in navigable waters.